ADSB Generator

The problem

Simulating realistic aircraft transponder communication for aerospace testing and machine learning models usually requires complex, expensive hardware or fragmented scripts. Researchers and developers lack a clean, reproducible Python tool to generate synthetic ADS-B baseband signals with precise control over RF impairments, transmitter characteristics, and noise distributions.

The approach

adsb-generator provides an end-to-end Python pipeline that bridges the gap between digital message formatting and physical RF channel behavior.

• Generates 112-bit Mode S Downlink Format 17 messages across four key aircraft types (identification, surface position, airborne position, and airborne velocity).
• Simulates a complete three-stage signal chain: ideal pulse-position modulation (PPM), transmitter impairments (amplitude droop and phase noise), and RF channel degradation (AWGN, IQ imbalance, frequency/phase offsets, and DC offsets).
• Built entirely on NumPy for high-performance array manipulation, with deterministic reproducibility via shared seeds and flexible distribution configs.

Outcome

adsb-generator enables researchers and aviation systems developers to instantly stream or export (.npz, .csv, .json, .jsonl) thousands of realistic baseband signals for downstream processing, algorithm testing, and neural network training in aerospace applications.